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THE CENTER FORPUBLIC INTEGRITYInvestigative Journalism in the Public Interest

InternatIonal ConsortIum

ICIJof InvestIgatIve JournalIsts

A global network of lobby groups has spent nearly $100 million since the mid-1980s to preserve the market for asbestos, a carcinogen now banned or restricted in 52 countries. Scientists say asbestos may cause up to 10 million deaths by 2030, with a

mounting toll in the developing world.

Dangers in the Dust ©2010 Center for Public Integrity 2

CONTENTS3COvEr ABOUT CPI4

Table of Contents 3 About the Asbestos Project

7 OvErvIEW: Exporting an EpidemicHuman Toll Reaches Millions as Asbestos Industry Expands Worldwide

26 INDIA: A Toxic EmbraceIndia’s Wide Use of Asbestos Brings Dire Warnings

34 BrAzIl: The Brockovich of BrazilFernanda Giannasi Fights a Potent Asbestos Industry

42 UNITED STATES: America’s Asbestos AgeA Toxic Legacy May Leave Behind a Half-Million Deaths

49 rUSSIA: The World’s Asbestos BehemothVast Amounts Shipped Overseas, Used at Home

55 MExICO: A Growing Death TollAsbestos Casualties Mount Amid Weak Enforcement and a Powerful Lobby

61 CHINA: A ravenous Appetite for AsbestosTop User China Faces Epidemic of Cancer

Go online for more about the global asbestos trade including interactive maps, supporting documents and related stories at: www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/asbestos


SHOW CONTENTS3COvEr FIrST ArTIClE4

About this ProjectIn the fall of 2009, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists began looking into the global trade in asbestos, a cancer-causing fiber banned or restricted in much of the industrialized world but aggressively marketed in developing countries. What evolved was a nine-month investigation of an international lobby, much of it coordinated from Canada, which promotes the use of asbestos in construction materials and other products.

ICIJ joined with reporters and producers with the BBC’s Interna-tional News Services (www.bbc.co.uk) to document the asbestos industry’s activities in Brazil, Canada, China, India, Mexico, Russia, and the United States. Our investigation concluded that the industry has spent nearly $100 million since the mid-1980s to keep asbestos in commerce. The team’s reporting reveals close relationships among the industry, governments and scientists, and cites predictions from health experts that new epidemics of asbestos-related disease will emerge in the coming decades. Some experts believe that by 2030, asbestos will have taken as many as 10 million lives around the world.

Dangers in the Dust: Inside the Global Asbestos Trade is based on extensive research in eight countries. The team relied on thousands of pages of documents, including court filings, scientific studies, and financial records, as well as on interviews with health officials, industry representatives, scientists, victims, lawyers, and activists.

FUNDING AND SUPPOrTDangers in the Dust is generously supported by a grant from the Adessium Foundation. Support for this and other Center for Public Integrity projects is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, Greenlight Capital LLC Employees, the John S. and James L. Knight Founda-tion, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Park Foundation, the Popplestone Foundation, Public Welfare Foundation, V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-10623725



Project StaffEditorial Director: David E. KaplanDeputy Director: Marina Walker

GuevaraAdditional Editing: Julie Vorman,

Gordon WitkinWeb Editor: Andrew GreenDeputy Web Editor/Social Media:

Cole GoinsDeputy Web Editor/Multimedia:

Erik LincolnFact-Checking: Peter Newbatt

SmithCommunications: Randy Barrett,

Steve Carpinelli

rEPOrTING TEAMProject Director: Jim Morrisreporting Team: Ana Avila

(Mexico), Steve Bradshaw (United

Kingdom), Te-Ping Chen (China), Dan Ettinger (U.S.), Murali Krishnan (India), Shantanu Guha Ray (India), Roman Shleynov (Russia), Marcelo Soares (Brazil), Abhishek Upadhyay (India)

DESIGN/MUlTIMEDIAWeb Site Design: Top Dead Center

DesignInteractive Maps and Graphics:

Stephen RountreePhotos: Traver Rigginsvideo: Sarah Whitmire

DIGITAl NEWSBOOKCoordinator: Aaron MehtaProduction: Roger Fidler, Reynolds

Journalism Institute, Columbia, Missouri www.rjionline.org

Additional ThanksBill Buzenberg, Francesca Craig, Robin Heller, Anne Koch, Tuan Le, Ellen McPeake, Simona Raetz, Jenny Richards, Fernando Rodrigues, Regina Russell, Ricardo Sandoval, Gordon Witkin

BBC (with special thanks to Anne Koch, Jon Cronin, Steven Duke, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Stephen Mulvey)

Tehelka (India)Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil)

McClatchy Newspapers (United States)

Novaya Gazeta (Russia)Proceso (Mexico)South China Morning Post (Hong

Kong)

Project Partners

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About ICIJThe International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) was launched in 1997 as a project of the Center for Public Integrity to globally extend the Center’s investigative style of journalism in the public interest. Based in 50 countries, ICIJ’s global network includes 100 of the world’s top investigative reporters who produce collaborative, cross-border reports on major global issues around the world.

Since its founding, ICIJ has released a series of groundbreaking reports with global impact, including stories on tobacco industry collu-sion with organized crime, the war profiteering of Haliburton and other contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, the privatization of scarce water resources, and political lobbying payments by unsavory governments. More information about the ICIJ can be found at www.icij.org.

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ICIJ also supports international investigative journalism by presenting the biennial Daniel Pearl Awards for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting.

About the CenterThe Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, and independent digital news organization specializing in original investigative journalism and research on significant public policy issues.

Since 1990, the Washington, D.C.-based Center has released more than 475 investigative reports and 17 books to provide greater transparency and accountability of government and other institutions. It has received the prestigious George Polk Award and more than 32 other national journalism awards and 18 finalist nominations from national organizations, including PEN USA, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Society of Environmental Journalists, Overseas Press Club, and National Press Foundation.

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Dangers in the Dust | OVERVIEW ©2010 Center for Public Integrity 7

SHOW CONTENTS3PrEvIOUS ArTIClE NExT ArTIClE4

In OSASCO, BRAzIL, an indus-trial city on the western flank of Sao Paulo, the past is buried be-

neath a Wal-Mart Supercenter and a Sam’s Club at the intersection of Avenida MariaCampos and Avenida dos Autonomistas. Here the Eter-nit asbestos cement factory was shuttered in 1993 and demolished in 1995 after 54 years of operation. Here three generations of work-ers — pouring asbestos into giant mixers with cement, cellulose and water, emptying bags, cleaning ma-chinery — were immersed in fiber-rich white dust, setting themselves up for diseases that would debili-tate many of them in retirement and kill some of them in excruciating fashion. Scores have died since the mid-1990s, at least 10 of mesothe-lioma, a rare malignancy that eats into the chest wall and dispatches its victims swiftly. Aldo Vincentin

succumbed at age 66 in July 2008, only three months after his diagno-sis. “They knew about the dangers of the materials and they didn’t pro-tect my husband,” his widow, Gise-lia Gomes Vincentin, says of Eternit. “I think many people will still die.”

Backed by a global network of trade groups and scientists, the multibillion-dollar asbestos indus-try has stayed afloat by depicting Osasco and similar tragedies as remnants of a darker time, when dust levels were high, exotic variet-ies of the fire-resistant mineral were used, and workers had little, if any, protection from the toxic fibers. There is evidence that dangers per-sist: Perilous conditions have been documented from Mexico City to Ahmedabad, India. And yet, despite waves of asbestos-related disease in North America, Europe, and Austra-lia, bans or restrictions in 52 coun-

Exporting an EpidemicHuman Toll ReacHes millions as asbesTos indusTRy

expands WoRldWide

By Jim MorrisInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Published Online | June 28, 2010



tries, piles of incriminating studies, and predictions of up to 10 million asbestos-related cancer deaths worldwide by 2030, the asbestos trade remains alive and well.

Asbestos is banned in the Euro-pean Union. In the United States it

is legal but the industry has paid out $70 billion in damages and litigation costs, and asbestos use is limited to automobile and aircraft brakes, gas-kets and a few other products. The industry has found new markets in the developing world, however,

Millions Face New Threat From a Deadly White FiberOnce prized for its fire-retardant qualities, asbestos is now banned in at least 52 countries. But backed by a multinational lobbying campaign, asbestos use is growing rapidly in developing countries, prompting health experts to warn that millions will die in future epidemics of lung cancer, asbestosis, and mesothelioma. The International Labor Organization estimates that 100,000 workers die each year from asbestos-related diseases.

Sources: U.S. Geological Survey; United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database; United Nations Environmental Programme; International Ban Asbestos Secretariat

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, www.icij.org

Graphics by: www.stephenrountree.com



where demand for cheap building materials is brisk. More than two million metric tons of asbestos were mined worldwide in 2009 — led by Russia, Chi-na, and Brazil — mostly to be turned into asbestos ce-ment for corrugated roof-ing and water pipes. More than half that amount was exported to developing countries like India and Mexico.

Health officials warn that widespread asbestos exposures, much as they did in the West, will result in epidemics of mesothe-lioma, lung cancer, and as-bestosis in the developing world. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that 125 million people encounter asbestos in the workplace, and the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 100,000 workers die each year from asbestos-related diseases. Thousands more perish from en-vironmental exposures. Dr. James Leigh, retired director of the Centre for Occupational and Environmen-tal Health at the Sydney School of Public Health in Australia, has fore-

cast a total of 5 million to 10 million deaths from asbestos-related can-cers by 2030. The estimate is “con-servative,” Leigh says. “If exposures in developing countries lead to epi-demics extending further in time, the numbers would be greater.” Leigh’s calculation does not include deaths from asbestosis, a non-can-cerous, chronic lung disease. Anoth-



er study, by two research-ers in New Delhi, suggests that by 2020, deaths from asbestos-related cancers could exceed 1 million in developing nations.

Behind the industry’s growth is a marketing campaign involving a di-verse set of companies, organized under a dozen trade associations and institutes. Backing them are interests ranging from mining companies like Brazil’s SAMA to manufac-turers of asbestos cement sheets like India’s Visaka Industries. The largely un-charted industry campaign is coordinated, in part, by a government-backed institute in Montreal and reaches from New Delhi to Mexico City to the apt-ly named city of Asbest in Russia’s Ural Mountains.

An analysis by the International Consortium of Investigative Jour-nalists has tracked nearly $100 mil-lion in public and private money spent by these groups since the mid-1980s in three countries alone — Canada, India and Brazil — to keep asbestos in commerce. Their

strategy, critics say, is one bor-rowed from the tobacco industry: create doubt, contest litigation, and delay regulation. “It’s totally unethi-cal,” says Jukka Takala, director of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work and a former ILO of-ficial. “It’s almost criminal. Asbestos cannot be used safely. It is clearly a carcinogen. It kills people.”



Industry-funded re-searchers have mounted a prolific response, placing into the scientific litera-ture hundreds of articles claiming that asbestos can be used safely. Their ar-gument is that chrysotile, or white, asbestos — the only kind sold today — is orders of magnitude less hazardous than brown or blue asbestos, which the industry stopped mining in the 1990s. “It’s an ex-tremely valuable material,” argues Dr. J. Corbett Mc-Donald, an emeritus pro-fessor of epidemiology at McGill University in Mon-treal who began studying chrysotile-exposed work-ers in the mid-1960s with the support of the Quebec Asbestos Mining Associa-tion. “It’s very cheap. If they try to rebuild Haiti and use no asbestos it will cost them much more. Any health effects [from chrysotile] will be trivial, if any.”

Health and labor officials recoil at such statements. “No exposure to asbestos is without risk,” the Col-legium Ramazzini, an international society of scholars on occupational

and environmental health, said in a recent paper. “Asbestos cancer vic-tims die painful, lingering deaths. These deaths are almost entirely preventable.”

Last fall, the American Public Health Association joined the Col-legium, the World Federation of Public Health Organizations, the International Commission on Oc-



cupational Health, and the Interna-tional Trade Union Confederation in calling for a global asbestos ban. In 2009, a panel of 27 experts con-vened by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer re-ported, “Epidemiological evidence has increasingly shown an associa-tion of all forms of asbestos … with an increased risk of lung cancer and mesothelioma.” The panel also found there was new evidence that asbestos causes cancer of the lar-ynx and the ovary.

But the asbestos industry has signaled that it will not go away quietly. Promotion of pro-industry studies is joined by campaigns of political lobbying and ad buying to ensure that asbestos is freely mar-keted in fast-growing countries. Consider some of the events just this year: In a March 16 letter, the head of the Asociación Colombiana de Fibras, a chrysotile trade group in Bogotá, Colombia, asked World Bank president Robert Zoellick to “soften your position” on the com-pound, arguing that projections of 100,000 asbestos-related deaths a year were based on “old data.” (The bank announced last year that it expects borrowers to use asbestos alternatives whenever feasible.) In documents obtained in Colombia by

ICIJ, the association boasts of cre-ating a spinoff in Ecuador to try to shape government regulations and decries the emergence of the “inter-national prohibitionist movement” against asbestos. “We have to start a wide campaign among all the chrys-otile associations in the world to counteract [the movement], sending communications to the directors of the World Health Organization and International Labor Organization,” state the minutes of a 2008 board meeting.

In a Jan. 7 letter, a lawyer for India’s Asbestos Cement Products Manufacturers Association scold-ed Dr. T.K. Joshi, an occupational medicine specialist in New Delhi, for making “baseless” allegations against chrysotile and frightening workers. The lawyer demanded that Joshi retract his “yellow reporting” or, he implied, face legal action. A few weeks earlier, the association had placed an ad in The Times of India, that nation’s leading English daily, headlined, “Blast Those Myths About Asbestos Cement.” The ad claimed, among other things, that the cancer scourge in the West had come during a “period of igno-rance,” when careless handling of asbestos insulation resulted in ex-cessive exposures. Such exposures



are long gone, the ad said, noting that asbestos cement products are “strong, durable, economical, ener-gy efficient and eco-friendly.”

A Troubled History

Fire- and heat-resistant, strong and inexpensive, asbestos — a naturally occurring, fibrous mineral — was once seen as a construction materi-al with near-magical properties. For decades, industrialized countries from the United States to Australia relied on it for countless products, including pipe and ceiling insula-tion, ship-building materials, brake shoes and pads, bricks, roofing, and flooring.

Ominous reports about the health effects of asbestos began ap-pearing in Europe in the late 19th century. By 1918, American and Ca-nadian insurance companies were refusing to cover asbestos workers because of rampant lung disease. In 1930, the ILO issued a warning: “All [asbestos] processes from ex-traction onwards unquestionably involve a considerable hazard.” In 1960, a South African pathologist confirmed a direct link between as-bestos exposure and mesothelioma. And yet, uncontrolled use of asbes-tos only grew, peaking in the United

States in 1973. By one estimate, 100 million Americans were occupa-tionally exposed to asbestos during the 20th century.

The first asbestos lawsuit against an asbestos insulation manufactur-er in the United States was filed in 1966. Internal documents showing corporate knowledge of the miner-al’s lung-ravaging properties began to surface, and by 1981 more than 200 companies and insurers had been sued. The following year, the nation’s biggest maker of asbestos products — Johns Manville Corp. — and two other defendants filed for bankruptcy protection in an effort to hold off the tide of litiga-tion. From the 1960s through 2002, more than 730,000 people filed as-bestos claims, resulting in damage payments and litigation costs of $70 billion, according to a 2005 study by the RAND Corp. Of this, $30 billion actually went to claimants.

As the evidence against asbes-tos accumulated in the 1980s, the Scandinavian countries began to impose bans. But the biggest blow for chrysotile came in 1999, when the European Commission decreed that products made of white asbes-tos would be outlawed as of Jan. 1, 2005. The EU’s decision to ban was replicated by Chile, Australia, Ja-



pan, and Egypt, among other coun-tries. Most flatly forbid use of as-bestos, though a few still allow it in brakes and gaskets. Fifty-two coun-tries eventually slapped restrictions on its use, including most of the developed world. Less hazardous but generally more expensive sub-stitutes such as polypropylene fiber cement, aluminum roof tiles, and steel-reinforced concrete pipe have gained favor.

Yet chrysotile continues to be mined and used heavily in some parts of the world; in 2008, raw fi-ber exports worldwide were val-ued by the United Nations at nearly $400 million. Russia is the world’s biggest producer, China the biggest consumer. But Canada — which uses almost no asbestos within its borders but still ships it abroad — is the primary booster, a role it as-sumed in the 1960s when the coun-try’s mining industry in Quebec was threatened by studies tying the mineral to cancer. The federal and provincial governments together have given C$35 million over the past quarter-century to the Mon-treal-based Chrysotile Institute, a nonprofit group that promotes the “controlled” use of asbestos in con-struction and manufacturing.

Controlled use is elusive in de-

veloping nations. ICIJ inquiries in a half-dozen countries, including on-site visits and interviews with local health officials and worker advo-cates, found spotty protection mea-sures and widespread exposure to asbestos dust. This will likely pro-duce outbreaks of occupational dis-ease for years to come in places like India, China, and Mexico, experts say. “Anybody who talks about con-trolled asbestos use is either a liar or a fool,” says Barry Castleman, an environmental consultant based near Washington, D.C., who advises the WHO on asbestos matters. “If they can’t have controlled use in Sweden, they can’t have controlled use in Swaziland.”

The Chrysotile Institutes

At the center of the debate is the Ca-nadian government-backed Chryso-tile Institute. The institute’s presi-dent, Clement Godbout, insists that his organization’s message has been misinterpreted. “We never said that chrysotile was not dangerous,” he says. “We said that chrysotile is a product with potential risk and it has to be controlled. It’s not something that you put in your coffee every morning.”

The institute is a purveyor of in-



formation, Godbout empha-sizes, not an international police agency. “We don’t have the power to interfere in any countries that have their own powers, their own sovereignty,” he says. “We don’t have the resources to travel the world every day.” Godbout says he is con-vinced that large asbestos cement factories in Indian cities have good dust con-trols and medical surveil-lance, though he acknowl-edges that there might be smaller operations “where the rules are not really fol-lowed. But it’s not an accu-rate picture of the industry. If you have someone on a highway in the U.S. driv-ing at 200 miles per hour, it doesn’t mean everybody’s doing it.”

The Chrysotile Institute has re-ceived $1 million from the asbestos industry over the past five years, according to Godbout, who says he doesn’t know how much was con-tributed in the previous 20, before he became chairman. Documents obtained under Canada’s Access to Information Act by Ottawa re-searcher Ken Rubin indicate that the industry gave more than $18

million to the institute from 1984 through 2001, meaning its total contribution to Godbout’s group is probably around $20 million.

The institute offers what it de-scribes as “technical and financial aid” to a dozen sister organizations around the world. These organi-zations, in turn, seek to influence science and policy in their own countries and regions. Consider the situation in Mexico, which in 2007 used 10 times as much asbestos as

A Striking TollANNUAl ASBESTOS-rElATEDCANCEr DEATHS2005 (est.)

Sources: International Labor Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Precention (U.S. only)

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, www.icij.orgGraphic by: www.stephenrountree.com

10,400

russia United States

United Kingdom

Germany Poland Belgium

10,000

5,850

4,400

2,600

680



its neighbor, the United States. Pro-moting chrysotile use is Luis Cejudo Alva, who has overseen the Insti-tuto Mexicano de Fibro Industrias (IMFI) for 40 years. Cejudo says he is in regular contact with the Chrys-otile Institute and related groups in Russia and Brazil, and gives presen-tations inside and outside of Mexico on the prudent handling of chryso-tile. “If I knew that our industry kills people, that our products affect the population, I wouldn’t be here talk-ing to you,” Cejudo says. “I am here because I have realized that many asbestos detractors exist, especially in Europe.” In the 1990s, he notes, IMFI members, along with their Ca-nadian and American counterparts, agreed to stop selling asbestos to factories without adequate safety measures; this led to some plant clo-sures. “We work hard with the gov-ernment Health and Labor ministry representatives to create the regula-tions and to make constant visits to prove that the factories are follow-ing these regulations,” Cejudo says.

A more skeptical perspective comes from Dr. Guadalupe Aguilar Madrid, a physician and researcher at the Mexican Social Security Insti-tute, which oversees public health under the federal Secretariat of Health. Aguilar maintains that the

IMFI exists not to promote safety but to preserve the chrysotile mar-ket in Mexico. It has insinuated it-self into both the Labor and Health secretariats, she said, and has had a “very big” influence over workplace and environmental rules. “When as-bestos was banned in industrialized countries and [producers] started to lose money, they came to the de-veloping countries to recover their investments,” Aguilar says. “After some South American countries banned asbestos, they focused on Mexico as their main manufacturer.”

Mexico ramped up imports of Ca-nadian chrysotile in the 1970s, and its weak worker-protection laws have allowed dangerous conditions to proliferate, Aguilar says. About 70 factories in and around Mexico City manufacture asbestos cement, and an indeterminate number make asbestos brakes, boilers, and other products, according to Aguilar. All told, she estimates that 10,000 Mexicans work with asbestos at any one time, many without proper protection. As a result,Mexico can expect an epidemic of mesothelio-ma in coming years, Aguilar says. Her research shows that the num-ber of deaths is rising steadily, as would be expected given the 30- to 40-year latency period commonly



associated with the disease. Includ-ing mesothelioma and lung cancer, “we could be talking about 3,000 to 5,000 deaths from diseases related to asbestos every year,” the doctor says. She calls Canada’s chrysotile exports “deplorable.”

Another sister organization is the Brazilian Chrysotile Institute, based in the state of Goiás, site of the coun-try’s only asbestos mine. A prosecu-tor in the state is seeking dissolution of the institute, a self-described pub-lic interest group with tax-exempt status. The prosecutor charges in a court pleading that the institute is a poorly disguised shill for the Bra-zilian asbestos industry, which pro-vides virtually all its budget. Among other things, the group helped the Brazilian government fund studies rigged to benefit the industry, the prosecutor alleges. Having inflict-ed “social damage stemming from [its] illegal practices,” the institute should pay one million reais (about $550,000) in damages and a fine of 5,000 reais ($2,800) for every day it remains open, the pleading says. In a statement to ICIJ, a spokesman for the institute denied the allegations, saying the group “ensures the health and security of workers and users, protection of the environment and [provides] information to society.”

Public records show that the insti-tute has taken in more than $8 mil-lion from asbestos companies since 2006.

That a Brazilian prosecutor is even attempting to shut down the institute is unusual. Most if not all of the pro-chrysotile groups have friendly relationships with their host governments and appear to easily overpower public health ad-vocates. In Russia,which produced one million metric tons of chrysotile in 2008, more than any country by far, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin pledged to assist the industry after a plea for help from a trade union chief. Putin “promised to support Russian producers of chrysotile, es-pecially in situations where we find ourselves under political pressure at the international level,” Andrei Kholzakov, chairman of the union that represents workers at one of the country’s largest asbestos com-panies, Uralasbest, said in an April 2009 press release.

Perhaps nowhere is the industry as strong as in India, the world’s second-largest consumer of asbes-tos, after China. There are more than 400 asbestos cement factories in the Indian state of Gujarat alone, concentrated in the city of Ahmed-abad, and the national market is



growing at the rate of 30 percent a year, due mainly to construction in poor, rural areas, where asbestos sheet is standard cover for homes.The Asbestos Cement Products Manufacturers Association enjoys a “tight relationship” with federal and state politicians, says activist Mad-humita Dutta. The state in which she lives, Tamil Nadu, owns an asbestos roofing materials plant, Dutta says, and there are similar arrangements in other states. “Things are a bit bleak,” she wrote in an e-mail to ICIJ. “The industry has grown and is expanding, their political clout get-ting stronger, their direct interven-tions in the government decision-making more apparent (through funding government studies), their propaganda more aggressive.” Gov-ernment sources told ICIJ that the manufacturers’ association has re-ceived about $50 million from the industry since 1985, with annual al-lotments rising as anti-asbestos sen-timent escalated. One of the group’s specialties is “advertorials” — faux news articles that extol the safety and value of asbestos products. The association’s annual budget now ranges from $17 million to $25 mil-lion, according to one member.

The ACPMA says on its website that the use of chrysotile in manu-

facturing “is safe for the workers, environment and the general pub-lic.” Earlier this year, however, au-thorities brought four criminal cas-es against owners of a 48-year-old asbestos cement factory in Ahmed-abad, Gujarat Composite Ltd., alleg-ing egregious health violations. At least 75 employees of the company have developed lung cancer over the past decade.

Though there are many uncer-tainties, researchers say that China appears poised for an explosion of asbestos-related illness in the not-too-distant future. Based on a formula developed by Antti Tos-savainen with the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health — that one mesothelioma case occurs for every 170 tons of asbestos produced and consumed — at least 3,700 cases of the disease can be expected each year, not to mention thousands of cases of lung cancer, asbestosis, and stomach cancer. China has yet to see the level of disease experi-enced in Europe, the U.S. and other industrialized parts of the world, experts say, because per capita con-sumption of asbestos remained low into the 1970s. That’s no longer true, as China is now the world’s biggest user of the mineral. Takala, director of the European Agency for Safety



and Health at Work, estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 Chinese will die of asbestos-related ailments each year by 2035. The country has about 1,000 asbestos mines and produc-tion facilities, one million asbestos workers, and annual consumption of more than 600,000 metric tons of chrysotile.

Canada’s Controversial Role

No country has defended chryso-tile as vigorously, and for as long, as Canada. When the U.S. Environ-mental Protection Agency issued a rule banning asbestos in 1989, the government of Canadapartici-pated inan industry lawsuit that overturned the rule. When France banned asbestos a decade later, Canada teamed up with Brazil in an unsuccessful World Trade Organiza-tion challenge. And when a United Nations chemical review committee recommended in 2008 that chryso-tile be listed under Annex III of the Rotterdam Convention — a treaty thatrequires exporters of hazardous substances to use clear labeling and warn importers of any restrictions or bans — Canada, India, and a few other nations kept the recommen-dation from winning the unanimous support it needed to pass.

It was the fourth time since 2004 that chrysotile had come up for consideration and the fourth time it had failed to make Annex III. It probably won’t come up again until 2011 at the earliest. “We knew it was not going to go through smoothly and unopposed,” says Sheila Logan with the United Nations Environ-ment Programme, who was in the thick of negotiations on chrysotile in 2006. Annex III, Logan explains, is a “semi-blacklist, though there are many substances on there that many countries will continue to import. The fear [among exporters and us-ers] is that countries will just take a blanket approach and say, ‘No, I’m not importing anything that’s includ-ed in the convention.’” Logan says she believes that chrysotile should be listed, even if — as some scien-tists claim — it is less carcinogenic than blue or brown asbestos, both of which belong to a family known as amphiboles. She draws an anal-ogy: “An X-ray may be less danger-ous than a gamma-ray burst, but I’m not going to stand in front of either of them. That’s my personal choice.”

Canada today is the world’s fifth largest producer of asbestos and its fourth largest exporter, shipping $97 million of raw fiber overseas in 2008. All this comes from just two



mines, both located in Quebec. The Chrysotile Institute says the indus-try accounts for about 700 direct and 2,000 indirect jobs — hardly an eco-nomic juggernaut. But it survives despite mounting criticism: Both the federal and provincial govern-ments have been besieged by letters from prominent academics, physicians, and others protesting Can-ada’s export of chrysotile. In a statement to ICIJ, the Quebec Ministry of Natu-ral Resources made its case: “There are no valid reasons to halt chryso-tile export since it can be used safely. [D]eveloping countries are in great need of this kind of material (as we were some years ago) to build good infrastruc-tures. Furthermore, substitutes to chrysotile have not yet been proven to be safer.” In addition to funding the Chrysotile Institute, the ministry has given C$748,000 since 2004 to the Société Nationale de l’Amiante, an asbestos research group. No lon-ger active, the group relocated its of-fice to the ministry, which is in the process of settling its “past commit-

ments and responsibilities,” a gov-ernment spokesman said.

Christian Paradis, natural re-sources minister in Canada’s con-servative government, is similarly supportive of the industry. Anative of the town of Thetford Mines, Quebec,Paradis once served as president of theAsbestos Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “Since 1979, the Government of Canada has promoted the safe and con-trolled use of chrysotile, [and] our

Hundreds of former mechanics exposed to chrysotile, or white, asbestos dust from brake linings have sued auto and parts manufacturers, alleging the toxic fibers gave them mesothelioma, a virulent form of cancer. (Credit: Flickr user Asbestorama)



position remains the same,” Paradis said in a statement to ICIJ. “Banning chrysotile is neither necessary nor appropriate. … All recent scientific studies show that chrysotile fibers, the only asbestos fiber that is pro-duced and exported from Canada, can be used safely under controlled conditions.”

Fine for export, perhaps, but not for domestic use. In 2009, Canada sent nearly 153,000 metric tons of chrysotile abroad. More than half went to India; the rest went to Indo-nesia, Thailand, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emir-ates. At home it was a different sto-ry: Canada used only 6,000 tons do-mestically in 2006, the last year for which data are available. Canadian officials seem determined to boost production: The Quebec Ministry of Economic Development, Innova-tion and Export Trade is consider-ing a C$58 million loan guarantee to save the floundering Jeffrey Mine. The mine’s owner has announced plans to ship 200,000 tons of chrys-otile per year to Asia if the money comes through.

Amir Attaran, an associate pro-fessor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa, says he is ashamed of the nation’s stance. “It’s absolutely clear that [Prime Minis-

ter] Stephen Harper and his govern-ment have accepted the reality that the present course of action kills people, and they find that toler-able,” Attaran says. “Canada’s cer-tainly aware that countries which purchase chrysotile do so in the ab-sence of correct regulation.”

The Scientists

On March 10, David Bernstein stepped up to the podium at the Soci-ety of Toxicology’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, and announced the results of his latest study. An American-born toxicologist based in Geneva, Bernstein began research-ing chrysotile in the late 1990s at the behest of a mine operator in Brazil. He was now reporting that rats ex-posed to chrysotile asbestos for five days, six hours a day, had shown no ill effects whatsoever. Rats ex-posed to brown amosite, a type of amphibole, hadn’t fared so well. The chrysotile fibers were cleared quickly from the animals’ lungs and caused “no pathological response at any point,” even though the ex-posure level was 50 percent higher than that for amosite, Bernstein said. The fibers have very different appearances under magnification. Chrysotile fibers look like ultrathin,



rolled sheets; amosite and other am-phiboles look like solid rods.

The sponsor of the as-yet unpub-lished study was Georgia-Pacific Corp. of Atlanta, which once made a ready-mix joint compound — a gooey white substance used to seal joints between sheets of drywall — that contained 5 percent chrysotile. Georgia-Pacific has been sued in the United States by a number of me-sothelioma victims who claim they were exposed to asbestos while sanding the dried compound. Bern-stein’s latest study, done in conjunc-tion with Georgia-Pacific’s chief toxicologist, Stewart Holm, could be good news for the company.

Bernstein is the most active of a dozen or soindustry-backed sci-entists who have helped fuel the asbestos trade by producing pa-pers, lecturing, and testifying on the relative safety of chrysotile. The in-dustry has spent tens of millions of dollars funding their studies, which have been cited some 5,000 times in the medical literature as well as by lobby groups from India to Canada. Bernstein’s work alone has been cit-ed 460 times. He has been quoted or mentioned in Zimbabwe’s Financial Gazette, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post and other publica-tions around the world. His curricu-

lum vitae suggests that he’s been a one-man road show for chrysotile, giving talks in 19 countries since 1999. Among his stops: Brazil, Chi-na, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Ko-rea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, and Vietnam. The indus-try paid for all of his travel, Bern-stein told ICIJ in an interview.

Indeed, all of Bernstein’s work on asbestos has been underwritten by the industry, and he has become its principal defender at scientific meetings and in other venues. Bern-stein says he has no idea how much all his studies have cost and empha-sizes that, in any case, most of the money goes to the laboratory in Ba-sel, Switzerland, where the animal experiments are performed. Court documents show that one sponsor, Union Carbide, paid $400,623 for work by Bernstein in 2003 and 2005.

In an interview in his hotel lobby the day before his presentation in Salt Lake City, Bernstein said that Georgia-Pacific in no way influenced his chrysotile research, nor have any of his other corporate sponsors. “I would work for any group,” Ber-nstein explained. “I have no limita-tions. Unfortunately, the groups that don’t like this work don’t ask me.” He decried the hyperbole surround-ing chrysotile — “It’s a hysterical



thing; it doesn’t come from science” — and said he doesn’t believe the fragile white fibers cause mesotheli-oma. They could cause lung cancer, he said, if exposures were extremely high.

The relevance of Bernstein’s rat experiments to humans is contested by fellow researchers. For example, an expert panel assembled by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded that rodents clear short asbestos fi-bers from their lungs about 10 times faster than do people. Bernstein’s animals, moreover, were exposed over a relatively brief period of time. Many workers inhale asbes-tos over months or years, not days. “Not everyone exposed, even heav-ily, will necessarily develop disease, but data in the scientific literature show that as little as one day of ex-posure in man and animals can lead to mesothelioma, and a month or less of exposure in man doubles the risk of lung cancer,” says Dr. Arthur Frank, a physician and professor at the Drexel University School of Public Health in Philadelphia.

If Bernstein is chrysotile’s scien-tific ambassador, then 92-year-old J. Corbett McDonald is its longest-tenured champion. He is the author of three dozen scientific papers

on chrysotile, and his work has been cited in the medical literature nearly 1,500 times. In a telephone interview, McDonald said he was approached by the Canadian gov-ernment in 1964 to study asbestos miners and millersin Quebec; he, in turn, appealed to the Quebec As-bestos Mining Association for fund-ing, which it agreed to provide. The impetus for the research, McDon-ald said, was a paper by Dr. Irving Selikoff of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine reporting that insulation workers with relatively light exposures to asbestos were dying of mesothelioma and other cancers at strikingly high rates.

A Lesson from Tobacco?

Minutes of the mining association’s November 1965 meeting, obtained by lawyers for asbestos victims, suggest that the group saw the to-bacco industry as a paradigm: “The consensus of opinion seemed to point out that the QAMA should take into its hands the ways and means to conduct the necessary research instead of doing it through universi-ties or letting it fall in the hands of the Government. As an example, it was recalled that the tobacco indus-try launched its own program and it



now knows where it stands. Indus-try is always well advised to look after its own problems.”

Forty-five years later, McDon-ald remains resolute in his defense of asbestos. He says there is “very strong evidence” that contaminants in chrysotile, and not the chrysotile itself, caused excesses of mesothe-lioma among the Quebec workers. The toxic agent, he suspects, was tremolite, a type of amphibole. Mc-Donald insists that his work was never influenced by the asbestos in-dustry. Indeed, he wasn’t sure how much its leaders even cared about his work. “It used to worry us a bit that they took so little interest in the results,” he says.

McDonald’s tremolite theory — rebutted by studies of textile work-ers exposed to almost pure chryso-tile, and just this year, a study of workers at a brake-lining factory — follows a pattern that Dr. David Egilman, a physician and clinical associate professor at Brown Uni-versity in Providence, Rhode Island, calls ABC: anything but chrysotile. In fact, some researchers and de-fense lawyers have argued that me-sothelioma could be triggered by a polio vaccine contaminated with a monkey virus. “Like the tobacco industry, they’ve been successful at

manipulating scientific theories to confuse the public about the real risks of using asbestos,” says Egil-man, who, like Frank and Castle-man, testifies on behalf of plaintiffs in asbestos lawsuits.

Bernstein’s and McDonald’s stud-ies have proved helpful to an in-dustry under growing pressure to disband. Amphiboles such as the vir-ulent blue crocidolite, which killed miners in South Africa for nearly two centuries before the nation im-posed a ban in 2008, are virtually never encountered today. There are obvious economic incentives, skep-tics say, to blame most of the asbes-tos disease in the past 50 years on obscure types of the mineral and im-ply that chrysotile, which accounts for 95 percent of all the asbestos ever used, is relatively benign.

“Is there a legitimate scientific question as to whether white asbes-tos is less dangerous [than blue or brown]? Yes,” Frank says. “But is it safe? No.”

Several key criticisms have been leveled at the researchers who de-fend chrysotile. They tend, for ex-ample, to focus on mesothelioma — the disease that comes up most often in litigation because it is considered amarker of asbestos exposure — and ignore lung cancer, which oc-



curs more frequently. ”Chrysotile is just as potent [as amphiboles] in terms of lung cancer, and it might even be more potent,” says Peter In-fante, former director of the Office of Standards Review at the U.S. Oc-cupational Safety and Health Admin-istration. They fixate on the amount of time chrysotile fibers spend in the lungs, failing to acknowledge that the fibers can do a figurative hit-and-run on cells, damaging DNA and pre-cipitating cancer. And they buy into what WHO consultant Castleman calls the fallacy of controlled use — the idea that employers in the devel-oping world are serious about dust suppression and ventilation.

Castleman has been researching asbestos cement substitutes — roof-ing and pipes made with cellulose fi-bers, ductile iron and fiberglass, for example — for the WHO and has de-termined that, at most, they cost 10 to 15 percent more to produce. By his reckoning, asbestos is not much of a bargain. “Obviously, the cost of death and disease and the even-tual cost of even halfway properly managing asbestos cement struc-tures wipes out any short-term sav-ings of 10 to 15 percent,” Castleman says. As for another industry claim — that substitute products may be more dangerous than chrysotile —

he notes, “They do not release car-cinogenic dust whenever they are sawed, drilled, and demolished.”

Despite the reassuring studies and the million-dollar marketing efforts, the asbestos industry faces stiffening headwinds. The number of countries imposing bans or re-strictions continues to climb, and groups of health and labor activists have sprung up in China, Brazil, In-dia, and other high-use countries. The government of Canada, long considered a leader on environmen-tal and health matters, has come under withering attack for pushing exports.

For his part, scientist Bernstein contends that his conclusion is the correct one: White asbestos can be used safely around the world. That the WHO, the European Union, and dozens of national governments dis-agree doesn’t bother him. “It’s not in my interest whether it’s the minori-ty view or not,” Bernstein says. “I’ve always felt that science will prevail at the end.” n

Ana Avila in Mexico City, Dan Ettinger in Washington, D.C., Murali Krishnan in New Delhi, Roman Shleynov in Moscow, and Marcelo Soares in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.

Dangers in the Dust | InDIA ©2010 Center for Public Integrity 26


NEW DELHI — Every day, the swirling waters of the Arabian Sea bring misery

to Alang, the world’s largest ship-breaking yard in western India’s Gujarat state. An estimated 55,000 workers, unmindful of the lethal effects of asbestos-laden material in the vessels, slave for long hours and, in the process, are exposed to deadly fibers. The Indian govern-ment is aware of the risks but loath to interfere: The men need jobs, and the Indian economy, among the world’s fastest-growing, needs sec-ondary steel from the beached ves-sels. “Reclamation and recycling,” says Pravin Nagarsheth, president of the Iron Steel Scrap and Ship Breakers Association of India (IS-SAI), “is a highly lucrative busi-ness.”

One hundred-twenty miles (two hundred kilometers) north of Al-ang, workers at hundreds of dusty asbestos factories in the city of

A Toxic Embraceindia’s Wide use of asbesTos bRings diRe WaRnings

By Murali Krishnan and Shantanu Guha RayPublished Online | July 15, 2010

An Indian worker with a bag of asbestos at a milling unit in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Health officials say many such workers are poorly protected from the lung-ravaging fibers. (Credit: Sonumadhavan)



Ahmedabad face similar hazards in the name of economic develop-ment: lung cancer, asbestosis, and a rapacious malignancy, usually found in the chest cavity, called me-sothelioma. In this case the end product is asbestos sheet, widely used in construction.

The two locales are centers of an emerging epidemic of asbestos-related disease in India.

Valued for its heat and fire re-sistance, asbestos was once wide-

ly used worldwide, but it is now banned or restricted by 52 coun-tries. Use of the mineral is banned entirely in the European Union. In the United States — where it is blamed for some 200,000 deaths and cost the industry $70 billion in damages and litigation costs — as-bestos use is limited to a handful of products, such as automobile brakes and gaskets.

But in India, asbestos use is booming.

Banned or restricted in 52 countries, asbestos use is growing quickly in developing countries like India. (Credit: Sonumadhavan)



The country is now the world’s second largest asbestos market, behind only China, consuming nearly 350,000 metric tons in 2008. The industry generates more than $850 million a year in revenue, and directly employs 300,000 people; indirectly, it supports as many as 3 million more. Backed by a pow-erful lobby, asbestos use in India has risen by 83 percent since 2004, according to government figures. Given evidence of poor workplace safety and weak regulations, such widespread use could prove disas-trous, say health experts. One study by two New Delhi researchers sug-gests that by 2020 deaths from as-bestos-related cancers could reach 1 million in developing nations. “The industry is using its economic and political power in a way that’s allowing it totally unrestrained growth,” says Barry Castleman, a U.S. environmental consultant who advises the World Health Organiza-tion on asbestos. “We can only ex-pect untold numbers of preventable deaths to occur as a result.”

According to recent estimates by the Asbestos Cement Products Manufacturers’ Association (ACP-MA), a New Delhi-based industry organization, the Indian asbestos market grew by more than 30 per-

cent just in the past year, primarily because of demands in the coun-try’s rural sector. “The asbestos market — despite being a health hazard — has grown because it serves the market for poor,” says Gopal Krishna of the Ban Asbestos Network of India (BANI). “And that market is growing at a tremendous pace. So, nobody has the time for complaints.”

A Potent Lobby

In India, asbestos products carry no health warning labels and trade unions have no mandate to pre-vent asbestos-related disease at workplaces. Although researchers around the world have linked lung cancer and other diseases with ex-posure to the widely used white, or chrysotile, asbestos, the powerful ACPMA — funded by 12 asbestos companies as well as by the Can-ada-based Chrysotile Institute — concedes nothing.

“That lung cancer deaths have been caused by inhaling asbestos fiber has not been conclusively proved in India,” argues John Ni-codemus, the ACPMA’s executive director. “This is the handiwork of groups like BANI. The govern-ment’s stand on asbestos is very



clear. It has yet to receive proof of the product being a health haz-ard.” The ACPMA and others con-tend that chrysotile asbestos is less toxic than blue or brown forms of the mineral that are no longer used. Nonetheless, many health experts say chrysotile can be deadly.

Nicodemus refused to divulge details on the ACPMA’s funding. But senior government sources say it has received $50 million since its

founding in 1985. A. Modi, president of an asbestos manufacturing com-pany affiliated with the association, told ICIJ that ACPMA member com-panies contribute 2 to 3 percent of their revenue to the lobby group for “promotional activities in In-dia that revolve around advertising promotions to counter baseless al-legations by Ban Asbestos Network India [and] legal and promotional activities that [are] mostly in rural

Workers at an asbestos mine in Udaipur, India, toil under dangerous conditions. (Credit: Sonumadhavan)



India.” This means that at current exchange rates, the ACPMA re-ceives the equivalent of $8 million to $13 million per year.

The group spends some of this money on advertorials, costing up to $34,000 apiece, in mass-circu-lation Indian dailies, ostensibly to counter what it terms disinforma-tion about the effects of asbestos. Sources say it also spends signifi-cant amounts on lobbying and train-ing — mostly in Canada and Russia — for its staffers. Its already siz-able budget is expected to increase as industry output grows — possi-bly to 600,000 metric tons a year — to meet demand for asbestos-sheet roofing in India’s villages.

The ACPMA’s lobbying activities were part of a detailed discussion on hazardous minerals during a spirited meeting at the Ministry of Mines in April, when demands for increased use of asbestos were op-posed by a host of scientific and public interest groups.

At the meeting, officials told ICIJ, representatives of BANI and the National Institute of Miners Health argued for an asbestos ban. Representatives of asbestos com-panies, in turn, demanded proof that asbestos causes lung diseases and dismissed the idea of a ban.

When public health advocates pro-duced global figures to argue their case, the industry officials replied that such figures reflected deaths in other countries and not India, where they say chrysotile use under “controlled conditions” poses little risk. But controlled use is nearly impossible to achieve in develop-ing nations, where workplace and environmental standards are weak, experts say.

Most of the asbestos used in In-dia comes from Russia or Canada. Despite the rapid increase in usage across India, little mention is made of the potential health effects of these imports. For example, a new-ly released Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) guidance manual for asbestos-based industries — with a foreword by Indian Envi-ronment Minister Jairam Ramesh — has no details about the alarm-ing rise in asbestos-related diseases worldwide or countries that have banned the product.

Those following the industry are not surprised. The first official records on the dangers of asbes-tos became public in India only in 2008 when BANI’s Krishna, then a young, unknown activist, demand-ed documents under the Right to Information Act — India’s freedom



of information law. But for the In-dian public, reporting on asbes-tos remains scarce. Experts say this is primarily because both the states and union territories have no mechanism to prove that lung can-cer deaths and other skin diseases are being caused by asbestos expo-sures. As a result, the Indian asbes-tos industry is insulated from the movement to ban asbestos globally.

The Case of Gujarat Composite

The lack of official attention has dire consequences for tens of thou-sands of workers likely to succumb to asbestos-related diseases, health experts warn. At just one company in Ahmedabad — Gujarat Compos-ite Ltd. —at least 75 workers have been diagnosed with lung cancer in the past 10 years, out of a work-force of about 1,000, according to NGO activists in Ahmedabad work-ing on asbestos-related diseases. At least 20 of those have died, they say. “No one listened to our repeat-ed complaints of breathing troubles and skin irritation,” says Rues Mu-thuswami Munian, who has suf-fered from the disease for nearly a decade. He and other sick workers say they were fired by the company and offered virtually no compensa-

tion, prompting them to file a com-plaint with the local police over conditions at the company. Shorn of funds, they are dependent on monthly handouts by a few NGOs.

Representatives of Gujarat Com-posite are the target of four criminal complaints brought by the state La-bour and Employment Department in March this year. The complaints accuse the company of a lack of safety records, failure to conduct medical exams of workers, and re-fusal to provide inspectors with a registry of its workers. “There were no records kept of the fibers float-ing in the atmosphere,” reads one complaint. Gujarat Composite offi-cials declined repeated requests by ICIJ for an interview.

U.S.-based Johns Manville held a stake in the 48-year-old factory when it was called Shree Digvijay Cement Co. and expressed dismay about its hygiene decades ago, ac-cording to documents obtained by ICIJ. In a confidential 1977 memo-randum, for example, a Johns Man-ville official wrote, “The Indian Government Environmental Divi-sion has been recently tightening dust emissions and Shree has been told to either shape up or close down with their management liable for jail sentences. Their present op-



eration is just indescribably poor. The wet end of the pipe machines is like ‘London fog’ with fiber floating all over from the fiber bins.” Johns Manville held 10 percent of Shree Digvijay’s stock until at least 1983.

In 1997, about a year after it ac-quired the factory, Gujarat Com-posite began subcontracting with two privately owned companies. “The saddest part of the story is this: the state government knows what is happening, yet no action has been taken on these two com-panies,” says Raghunath Manwar of the Ahmedabad-based Occupa-tional Health and Safety Associa-tion (OHSA), which advocates for asbestos victims.

“The environment is lethal,” says Dheemant Badia, an OHSA trustee. “These workers work in a death zone because there is no practice of measurement of airborne asbes-tos-fiber dust.” Gujarat’s Director-ate of Industrial Safety and Health has routinely received complaints about Gujarat Composite but, say critics, has turned a blind eye.

Nascent Debate

Efforts to ban asbestos at the na-tional level have gone nowhere. The White Asbestos (Ban on Use and

Import) Bill of 2009 –— introduced in the Upper House of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) by Vijay Jawaharlal Darda, a member from India’s west-ern Maharashtra state — drew flak from influential Congress Member of Parliament T. Subbarami Reddy, an industrialist and chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Envi-ronment, and Forests.

“I will object to the ban,” Sub-barami said. “For the last four de-cades, white asbestos is being used in several parts of the country.” His objection was overruled by the vice-chairman of the Rajya Sabha, P. J. Kurien. The bill is pending in the Upper House, but observers give it little chance of passage.

At least one Indian state has taken matters into its own hands. In January 2009, the Kerala State Human Rights Commission prohib-ited the use of asbestos-sheet roof-ing for school buildings. But in the majority of Indian states and ter-ritories, asbestos is considered an essential ingredient of growth. In India’s southern Andhra Pradesh state, a pro-asbestos agenda is being pushed by one of its MPs, Gaddam Vivekanand, who report-edly controls 25 percent of India’s asbestos production through his



ownership of seven factories across the country. An eighth will open this year in eastern Orissa state.

The ubiquitous nature of the fiber is best demonstrated in western Maha-rashtra state, filled with asbestos facto-ries in places such as Mumbai, Pune, and Kolhapur. The Maharashtra Pollu-tion Control Board acknowledges in its annual reports the mounting number of lung diseases in the state. But it has taken no action to make the state asbestos-free.

Beneath the growing debate, note some experts, lies the fact that India remains a country where an estimated 450 million people live below a government-stipulated pov-erty line. In such an environment, the chances of factories maintain-ing proper safety and health stan-dards may be dim indeed. Castle-man, the environmental consultant, says it is reasonable to expect hun-dreds of thousands of asbestos-

related deaths before India reacts. “I’m hard-pressed to point to any sign of success that activists and public health people have had over there,” he says.

Asha Gupta, a lawyer who rep-resents asbestos victims in Gujarat state, says that companies at least need to provide safety gear to those working in such hazardous con-ditions. “Otherwise, workers will continue to fall sick and, eventu-ally, die a slow, painful death.” n

Abhishek Upadhyay contributed to this report.

An asbestos mine worker in Andhra Pradesh, India. Use of the toxic mineral in construction materials is increasing rapidly. (Credit: Sonumadhavan)

Dangers in the Dust | BRAzIL ©2010 Center for Public Integrity 34


SÃO PAULO — Inching along at rush hour in her battered black Chevro-

let Corsa, Fernanda Giannasi joked about the pariah status she’s attained with the Brazil-ian asbestos industry. “I have no name,” she said. “I’m just ‘That woman.’ ”

No wonder. Giannasi, an inspector with the federal Ministry of Labor and Em-ployment, has been trying to shut down the industry for the past quarter-century. She says that white asbestos — mined in the central Brazilian state of Goiás, turned into cement and other domestic products and increasingly sent abroad — has taken countless lives and will take countless more unless it is banned nationwide. The idea that it can be used safely, she says, is “a fiction.”

The 52-year-old Giannasi has

many admirers in the global public health community. One local doc-tor calls her the “Brockovich of Brazil,” a nod to Erin Brockovich, the California file clerk who blew the whistle on water pollution by

The Brockovich of Brazil feRnanda giannasi figHTs a poTenT asbesTos indusTRy



During an inspection in Sao Paulo, Fernanda Giannasi tells a business owner that she must dispose of illegal asbestos products. (Credit: Felipe Lima)



Pacific Gas & Electric and inspired a feature film. Giannasi’s true con-stituency, however, lies in places like Osasco, a graffiti-scarred, blue-collar city west of São Paulo and home to Brazil’s most notorious as-bestos cement factory for 54 years.

The factory, owned by a company called Eternit, opened in 1939 and was, for most of its existence, thick with asbestos fibers, former work-ers say. Eliezer João de Souza, 68, worked there from 1968 to 1981, cut-ting asbestos sheets and corrugated tiles into various sizes. “It was full of dust everywhere,” de Souza says. “You could see it through the sun-light.” Workers had no respiratory protection until 1977, when they were given cheap paper masks, says de Souza, who had small tumors re-moved from his pleura — the thin membrane that covers the lungs and lines the chest cavity — in 2000. At one point “they called the workers in and took X-rays, but they never showed us the results,” he says. “It was always a game of lies.”

João Batista Momi, 81, spent 32 years at the plant — “It was dirty the whole time,” he says — and devel-oped asbestosis. He sued his former employer in 1998 and won but, be-cause of a company appeal languish-ing in the Brazilian Supreme Court,

has yet to receive any compensation. José Antonio Domingues, 71, had his cancerous right lung removed in 2008, 17 years after he left the plant. He had worked there for 15 years. “It was black inside,” he says. “I’m happy I’m still alive.”

A Top User and Exporter

The three men belong to the Asso-ciação Brasileira dos Expostos ao Amianto (ABREA) — the Brazilian Association of People Exposed to Asbestos. It is one of more than 70 victims’ groups that have formed around the world, mostly in the past two decades, as the use of asbestos has spread to fast-growing countries and its dangers have become better known. Once widely used in the U.S. and Europe for construction materi-als and insulation, asbestos is now banned in the European Union and limited to a handful of products, such as automobile brake linings, in the United States. Fifty-two countries have banned or sharply restricted use of the fibrous mineral, long val-ued for its heat and fire resistance.

Fueled by an aggressive indus-try campaign, however, the use of chrysotile, or white, asbestos use has grown markedly in the develop-ing world, led by such countries as



China, India, and Brazil. With the mineral’s new life in emerging mar-kets, the cumulative death toll from asbestos may reach 10 million by 2030, experts say.

Thousands of those deaths are expected in Brazil, now the world’s third-biggest producer of asbestos. Brazil is also the world’s third larg-est exporter — shipping mainly to Asia as well as to countries like Colombia and Mexico. And it is the world’s fifth largest user, consuming 94,000 met-ric tons in 2007 — more than 50 times the amount used in the United States that year. The Brazilian as-bestos industry claims to generate 2.5 billion reais — about $1.3 billion — for the nation’s economy each year. The 11 companies that mine asbestos and make asbestos-containing products in Brazil direct-ly employ 3,500 but say they account for 200,000 jobs when one includes construction workers, dealers, and others.

At the heart of the industry is the Brazilian Chrysotile Institute. Public records show that the institute, based in Goiás, has taken in more than $8

million from the industry since 2006, funding used to promote asbestos use across Brazil. A prosecutor in the state is seeking dissolution of the institute, a self-described public in-terest group with tax-exempt status. The prosecutor charges in a court pleading that the institute is a poor-ly disguised shill for the Brazilian

asbestos industry, which provides virtually all of its budget. Having inflicted “social damage stemming from [its] illegal practices,” the insti-tute should pay 1 million reais (about US$550,000) in damages and a fine of 5,000 reais (US$2,800) for every day

Asbestos gaskets at a small Sao Paulo business. The label reads: “Caution! This product contains asbestos. Do not breathe asbestos dust. The danger is highest for smokers.” (Credit: Felipe Lima)



it remains open, the pleading says. In a statement to the International Consortium of Investigative Journal-ists, a spokesman for the institute de-nied the allegations, saying the group “ensures the health and security of workers and users, protection of the environment and [providing of] infor-mation to society.”

Eternit and “The Bill Gates of Switzerland”

When ABREA was formed in 1995, it had about 470 members, mostly from the Eternit plant in Osasco. “At least 30 percent have died in the last 14 years,” says its president, de Souza. At least 10 have died of mesothelio-ma, a rare cancer that often starts in the pleura and is virtually always tied to asbestos exposure. The factory relied mainly on white asbestos, Gi-annasi says, though it also may have used “very small amounts” of blue into the mid-1960s. Industry repre-sentatives and some scientists main-tain that blue and brown asbestos — no longer mined or used — are more lethal than white, a position disputed by many health experts.

Fuming about what they believe to have been gross corporate mis-conduct, de Souza and his fellow retirees are following a criminal tri-

al in Turin, Italy, where two former shareholders in the Swiss Eternit Group — including onetime chair-man Stephan Schmidheiny, a phi-lanthropist dubbed “The Bill Gates of Switzerland” by Forbes magazine for his billion-dollar commitment to poor entrepreneurs in Latin America — stand accused of precipitating an environmental disaster. The charges stem from conditions at an Eternit asbestos cement factory in the Ital-ian town of Casale Monferrato; some 2,000 people who worked in or lived near the plant have died of asbestos-related diseases. “Considering that hazardous exposures experienced in Italy were replicated elsewhere, there must be hundreds of thousands of people who have died from their exposures to this company’s asbes-tos products,” says Laurie Kazan-Al-len, coordinator of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat in London.

In an e-mail, spokesman Peter Schuermann wrote that Schmid-heiny “cannot understand why he should be made responsible for the entire 80-year history of the Italian Eternit as one of the main defen-dants.” The Swiss Eternit Group was the biggest shareholder in the Italian plant for only its last 10 years, Schuermann wrote, and im-plemented “workplace safety mea-



sures which were in accordance with the highest standards.” Ac-cording to Schuermann, the Swiss group sold its shares in the Osasco plant more than 25 years ago. He declined to comment on the ex-workers’ allegations but noted that “Stephan Schmidheiny himself worked as a trainee in the Brazil-ian Eternit under the same working conditions as the other employees.”

Giannasi has little sympathy for Schmidheiny, who claims on his own website that he was “dangerously exposed to asbestos fibers during my training period in Brazil.” Her disgust with the running of the Osas-co plant motivated her to co-found ABREA. She continues to attend its monthly meetings, keeping the ailing members and their families apprised of developments in the as-bestos wars. They seem to relish her stories: She’s held up asbestos ship-ments at ports and on highways and barged into businesses suspected of illegally selling asbestos products. She’s received death threats and been sued by the asbestos industry. For a time she was exiled to a tiny office at the Labor Ministry with no computer, no telephone and no re-sponsibilities. She routinely defies her bosses, who view her as a head-line-seeking provocateur; they’ve

restricted her inspection activities to São Paulo state even though she is a federal official. “Every day is a problem,” Giannasi says.

The Brazilian asbestos industry has proved to be a fierce opponent. SAMA, which operates the Cana Brava mine in Goiás, and Eternit S.A., which operates four plants that make asbestos and non-as-bestos roof sheets and other prod-ucts, collectively gave more than 2 million reais (US$1.1 million) to federal, state, and local candidates from 2002 to 2008, records show. “They have many tentacles, like an octopus,” Giannasi says. Only four of Brazil’s 26 states, including São Paulo, have enacted asbestos bans. Asked about Giannasi’s campaign, a SAMA official addressed only the company’s own processes, saying fiber levels at the mine are “20 times lower than what the law requires” and that “workers have no physical contact with the mineral.”A spokes-woman for Eternit S.A., which has no connection to the Swiss Eternit Group, declined to comment.

Giannasi vs. Asbestos, Inc.

Raised during Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorship in the 1960s, Giannasi recalls hearing the



screams of accused sub-versives being tortured at the army headquarters across from her family’s house in northeastern São Paulo state. The repres-sion that defined that era and the progressive lean-ings of her parents, both public school teachers, steered Giannasi to her eventual role as an ad-vocate for workers with asbestos-related diseas-es, whom she compares to genocide victims. She made her first visit to the Eternit plant in Osasco in 1986, judging its hygiene to be poor and its medi-cal records inadequate. By 1991 she had inspected hundreds of other dusty plants and concluded that controlled use of asbestos was im-possible. She was transferred from São Paulo to Osasco — “a place for troublemakers” — where she promptly made trouble for Eternit, halting the demolition of its factory in 1995 until a plan was in place to contain decades of asbestos waste. By 1998 she was a nationally known activist, referring to the asbestos industry as a “mafia” and accusing it of “blackmailing” sick workers

with paltry settlement offers. Eter-nit sued her for defamation, but a judge threw the case out.

The years since have been marked by sporadic conflicts with the indus-try and her own ministry, and disap-pointment with the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former union leader. Asbes-tos production in Brazil fell during the early 1990s and then gradually increased until 2002, when Lula was elected. In the years since, produc-tion has accelerated. Giannasi made her displeasure known and in early

Fernanda Giannasi, second from left, and anti-asbestos activist Laurie Kazan-Allen, third from left, lead retired workers from the now-demolished Eternit asbestos cement plant in Osasco, Brazil, in a moment of silence for those who have died. (Credit: Felipe Lima)



2004 was stripped of her inspection duties for 45 days. Her authority was restored only after she went to the press, she says. Giannasi today seems close to exhaustion, her fre-netic pace unsustainable. Her ulti-mate aim — a federal ban on asbes-tos — appears out of reach.

Still, “the situation here would be far worse if she wasn’t working on it,” says Dr. Eduardo Algranti, chief of the division of medicine at Fun-dacentro, a São Paulo foundation that helps sick workers. “She’s very tough, very consistent in her ac-tions. She’s absolutely committed.”

“A Mesothelioma Time Bomb”

Dr. Ubiratan de Paula Santos, a pul-monologist at the University of São Paulo Medical School, says he sees about 20 cases of mesothelioma a year, a number that has been slowly climbing. Most, but not all, of his pa-tients were asbestos workers; one woman developed mesothelioma af-ter sanding and painting her asbes-tos tile roof for Christmas over a pe-riod of years. “It’s not important how intense the exposure is,” de Paula Santos says. “Some people were ex-posed only for one month.” On aver-age, victims survive 12 to 16 months after diagnosis, enduring extreme

pain and the terrible knowledge that their condition is incurable. “They know they have their necks in the guillotine,” the doctor says.

It’s for these people that Giannasi forges ahead. Last fall she allowed an ICIJ reporter to accompany her and a colleague, Antonio Carlos Rodrigues Pimentel, on surprise inspections of two gasket shops in São Paulo alleged to be selling asbestos products in violation of state law. At the first shop, on the northern fringe of the city, she and Pimentel were met by a scowling, pot-bellied man who tried to deny them entry. Giannasi held up her government badge and demanded to be buzzed in. Once admitted, she and Pimentel quickly found asbes-tos gaskets scattered among the shop’s inventory. Defiant at first, the shop’s owner grew deferential when Giannasi threatened to close the place unless every shred of the toxic mineral was thrown out. The owner promised to comply and or-dered her workers to begin round-ing up the prohibited items. “They all follow the same script: ‘We don’t use asbestos, we disposed of it.’” Giannasi says. “You always find something.”

Four days earlier, Giannasi had traveled in an unofficial capac-



ity with Pimentel and Kazan-Allen, the anti-asbestos activist, to Poços de Caldas, a city in the mountains about 150 miles north of São Pau-lo. The American aluminum giant Alcoa, which has operated a plant there since 1970, had just been hit with its first mesothelioma lawsuit in Brazil, filed by a 58-year-old for-

mer employee. The case had caused some-thing of a scandal in the company town, but Gi-annasi saw it as an opportunity to take her mes-sage to a new au-dience in Minas

Gerais, a state in which she is for-bidden to inspect. Having contact-ed the local media, she appeared at the town hall on a Friday afternoon and gave her standard presenta-tion with evangelical fervor, show-ing slides of dying cancer victims, handing out brochures on the dan-gers of asbestos, and conducting an impromptu hallway news confer-ence. Kazan-Allen stepped up to the microphone and warned that “Bra-zil is at the beginning of a very big curve. A mesothelioma time bomb is about to go off.”

That evening, Giannasi visited the former Alcoa worker, Dante Un-tura, at his home. Untura had per-formed maintenance at the factory, which makes aluminum powder, in-gots and other items, from 1970 to 1987. He had cut and drilled sheets of Marinite insulation, which likely contained brown asbestos and was made in the United States by Johns Manville Corp. “We had no masks,” Untura said. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma in August 2009; after this, he said, “Everything changed. I lost track of life. There’s no more color. It’s all gray.”

On this warm night in mid-No-vember, Untura did not look espe-cially ill or seem to be in pain. His house wasdecorated for Christ-mas. His partner and stepdaughter served coffee and cake and tried hard to pretend that nothing was wrong. Untura became emotional only when discussing his family; it was for them, he said, that he had sued Alcoa in Brazil and was plan-ning to sue in an American court.

The U.S. case was filed on Jan. 20. Seventeen days later, Untura was dead. Alcoa declined to com-ment on his lawsuit. n

Marcelo Soares in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.

“Brazil is at the beginning of a very big curve. A mesothelioma time bomb is about to go off.”

Dangers in the Dust | UnITED STATES ©2010 Center for Public Integrity 42


WASHInGTOn, D.C. — The first sign of

trouble came as Bill Rog-ers was mowing his lawn one morning in January 2007. “As I would go back and forth with the mower, I would run out of air,” says Rogers, 67, of Palm Bay, Fla.

Rogers went to the doc-tor and learned that his right lung was full of fluid. Three days later he was diagnosed with mesothe-lioma, a lethal tumor that occurs in the lining of the chest or the abdomen and is almost always associated with as-bestos exposure. “I’d heard of it, but I didn’t really know what it was,” he says. “They told me it’s not a good cancer to get.”

That Rogers is alive more than

three years after his di-agnosis is something of a miracle. To him, the source of his illness is clear: He worked on or around asbestos-contain-ing automobile brakes, mostly at General Motors dealerships, for 44 years. He and his co-workers had used compressed-air hoses to clean out brake drums, where debris from worn asbestos brake shoes would collect, and had filed and sanded the shoes when installing new brakes. Although he rou-tinely wore a respirator

while sanding plastic filler during body work, he says, no one ever told him he needed one for brake work.

Rogers sued GM, Ford, Chrysler, and seven manufacturers and sup-pliers of brakes and clutches in 2008

America’s Asbestos Age a Toxic legacy may leave beHind a Half-million deaTHs



“As I would go back and forth with the mower, I would run out of air.”

— Bill Rogers



and settled with the last of them in 2009. He is among hundreds of for-mer mechanics and body shop em-ployees known to have developed mesothelioma after working on brakes, clutches and gaskets, which contained the most common form of the mineral — chrysotile, or white, asbestos — well into the 1990s. Many have sued auto manufacturers and parts makers, litiga-tion that reflects the un-ceasing burden of asbes-tos disease in the United States.

Asbestos has decimated the ranks of miners, mill-ers, factory workers, insu-lators and shipyard work-ers, some of whom began filing workers’ compensa-tion claims as far back as the 1930s. The modern era of asbestos lawsuits be-gan the 1970s with claims from these same groups of workers. Many took in massive doses of fiber and died of diseases such as asbestosis, which can develop within a decade of initial exposure. Some of the cas-es involved mixtures of amosite, or brown, asbestos, which is no longer used, and chrysotile.

In court now, aside from a few heavily exposed workers, are me-chanics, teachers from asbestos-filled schools, and wives and chil-dren of workers who brought home asbestos on their clothing. Most of these people had relatively light

exposures and developed mesothe-lioma, a disease that can take 30, 40 or even 50 years to appear.

Although asbestos use in the U.S. plummeted from a peak of 803,000 metric tons in 1973 to just 1,460 met-

Hundreds of former mechanics exposed to chrysotile, or white, asbestos dust from brake linings have sued auto and parts manufacturers, alleging the toxic fibers gave them mesothelioma, a virulent form of cancer. (Credit: Flickr user Asbestorama)



ric tons in 2008, the nation’s epidem-ic is far from over. As many as 10,000 Americans still die of asbestos-relat-ed diseases each year; one expert estimates that 300,000 or so will die within the next three decades.

A Mounting Toll

Once broadly utilized by U.S. indus-try — not only in brakes but also in construction, insulation and ship-building — asbestos was heralded for its remarkable resistance to fire and heat. Strong and inexpensive, the naturally occurring, fibrous min-eral acquired a darker reputation in the 1960s as its health effects became widely known. Internal documents showing corporate knowledge of the mineral’s carcinogenic properties began to surface, and by 1981 more than 200 companies and insurers had been sued. The following year, the nation’s biggest maker of asbes-tos products — Johns Manville Corp. — filed for bankruptcy protection in an effort to hold off the tide of litiga-tion. From the early 1970s through 2002, more than 730,000 people filed asbestos claims, resulting in costs to the industry of about $70 billion, according to a 2005 study by the RAND Corp. Of this amount, about $49 billion went to victims and their

lawyers, and $21 billion went toward other legal costs.

Asbestos use has largely moved overseas, fueled by an aggressive industry campaign that has pushed up chrysotile consumption in fast-growing countries like China, Bra-zil, and India. Banned or restricted in 52 countries, asbestos products can still be sold in the U.S. but are largely limited to auto and aircraft brakes and gaskets. China, the world’s leading consumer, used 626,000 metric tons of asbestos in 2007 — 350 times the amount used in America that year.

The decline in usage in the U.S., however, has done little for those

already exposed — and for those who continue to be at risk. Long latency periods for mesothelioma and lung can-cer ensure that there will be vic-tims for years to come, health ex-

perts say. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention re-ported that 18,068 Americans died of mesothelioma from 1999 through 2005, with the annual toll edging to-ward 3,000. Another 1,500 or so die

Long latency periods for mesothelioma and lung cancer ensure that there will be victims for years to come.



each year of asbestosis, a rate that has “apparently plateaued,” accord-ing to the CDC. The number of as-bestos-related lung cancer deaths is harder to pin down given theu-biquity of smoking, but could be as high as 8,000 per year. Dr. Rich-ard Lemen, a former assistant U.S. surgeon general who consults for plaintiffs in asbestos cases, has cit-ed estimates of 189,000 to 231,000 worker deaths from all asbestos-related diseases from 1980 to 2007. “Another 270,000 to 330,000 deaths are expected to occur over the next 30 years,” he told a Senate commit-tee in 2007.

If Lemen’s figures are correct, that would put the death toll from America’s asbestos age at a half-mil-lion people. In its 2005 study, RAND similarly projected 432,465 asbes-tos-related cancer deaths from 1965 through 2029; this number excludes fatal cases of asbestosis.

The U.S. Environmental Protec-tion Agency tried to ban asbestos in 1989 but was stopped by an indus-try lawsuit. Legislation to impose a ban has failed to pass since Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash, introduced it in 2002. Murray has pointed out that imported asbestos brakes are still being sold for older vehicles, put-ting both professional mechanics

and weekend tinkerers at risk, and that asbestos can be found in a vari-ety of items. Laboratory tests com-missioned by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO), a victims’ advocacy group, have revealed the presence of asbestos in products as diverse as window glazing made in the U.S. and a toy fingerprinting kit made in China. ADAO’s CEO, Linda Reinstein, says she is hopeful that proposed revi-sions to the notoriously weak Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 would close loopholes that allowed the 1989 ban to be overturned.

Experts say that the current U.S. workplace standard for asbestos — 0.1 fibers per cubic centimeter of air, adopted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1994 — still allows a worker to inhale more than 1 mil-lion fibers over the course of a day. The National Institute for Occupa-tional Safety and Health (NIOSH) estimates that exposures at this level will produce five lung cancer deaths and two asbestosis deaths for every 1,000 workers exposed over a lifetime. Federal officials believe that 1.3 million workers in general industry and construction and 45,000 miners are still exposed to asbestos.



$43 Million of Pro-Industry Science

Mindful of their potential liabil-ity on brake linings, GM, Ford and Chrysler have fought the current round of mesothelioma lawsuits with vigor. Court records show that the three have paid nearly $43 million since 2001 to scientific experts at two consult-ing firms — ChemRisk and Exponent — who have testified that the amounts of chrysotile fibers released from the handling of brake shoes (used in older drum brakes) and pads (used in newer disc brakes) were either harmless or in insufficient quanti-ties to cause disease.

Several of these experts — most notably Dennis Paustenbach, presi-dent of ChemRisk and former vice president of Exponent — have published papers in peer-reviewed journals concluding that brake me-chanics are not at increased risk of developing mesothelioma or lung cancer. The papers are offered as evidence by defendants seeking to avoid financial blows like the $15

million verdict returned against Ford by a Baltimore jury on April 28. In that case, Joan Dixon, a 68-year-old grandmother, died of mesothelioma after washing her husband’s asbestos-coated work clothes for 14 years. Her husband, Bernard, had done part-time brake

work in a garage that specialized in Ford vehicles. A ChemRisk toxicologist, Brent Finley, was a defense expert in the case. A Ford spokeswoman declined to comment on the verdict.

In a separate am-icus brief filed with the Michigan Supreme Court in 2007, more than 50 physicians and

scientists took aim at industry con-sultants retained in the brake litiga-tion. “It is in no way surprising that the experts and papers financed by these manufacturers conclude that asbestos in brakes can never cause mesothelioma,” the brief says.

The brief contends that Pausten-bach’s work on asbestos follows a “business model” under which he publishes exculpatory papers on compounds — such as hexavalent chromium, the groundwater pol-

Dennis Paustenbach



lutant at the center of the Erin Brockovich case in California — that are the subject of lawsuits. Paustenbach strongly de-nies the charge. Records show that his firm, Chem-Risk, was paid almost $12 million by the three auto-makers from 2001 to 2009.

In an e-mailed state-ment, Paus ten bach main-tained that he is an impar-tial scientist and pointed to a pair of studies on ra-diation and an industrial chemical in which he de-livered bad news to his funders. “Our thorough and independent research and analysis stand on their own merits,” he wrote of his work on asbestos, “and there has been no specific credible challenge to the conclusions we drew.”

A scientist with Ex-ponent, which received $31 mil-lion from the automakers, agreed with Paustenbach. Epidemiological studies “have shown quite convinc-ingly that neither lung cancer nor mesothelioma risks are increased among workers engaged in auto-motive, including brake, repair,”

Dr. Suresh Moolgav kar wrote in a statement.

Ford said in a statement that the “vast majority of money” it has spent on consultants like ChemRisk “is directly related to expert costs incurred in defending the Com-pany against meritless lawsuits …

Johns Manville Corp., once the largest U.S. asbestos manufacturer, filed for bankruptcy in 1982 to shield itself from looming lawsuits. (Credit: Flickr user smaedli)



and is not related to the funding of scientific studies.” A spokesman forChrysler declined to comment; a GM spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Sixty Years of Warnings

Government warnings about as-bestos in brakes go back decades and remain in effect. As long ago as 1948, a National Safety Council newsletter cautioned, “Asbestos used in the formulation of brake lining is a potentially harmful com-pound.” A bulletin issued by NIOSH in 1975 warned that brake work could produce “significant expo-sures” to asbestos and recommend-ed that employers put dust-control measures in place; nearly one mil-lion workers were at risk, the insti-tute said. NIOSH held meetings on the subject in 1975 and 1976; among those present were representatives of Ford, GM and Johns Manville, then the nation’s biggest manufac-turer of asbestos products.

The message never filtered down to people like Bill Rogers. “There were no warning labels on the [brake shoe] boxes that said it was harmful to you,” he says. “Nobody ever seemed to talk about it.” Gary DiMuzio, a lawyer who has represent-

ed about 200 mesothelioma victims, says that the automakers and brake lining manufacturers did not give me-chanics and vehicle owners “a real-istic appraisal of the risks they were facing and how to minimize those risks.” Techniques to limit asbestos exposure — ventilation, the use of water to curb dust — were “widely discussed in the 1930s,” DiMuzio says. “It wasn’t rocket science. This was basic engineering and they just didn’t want to do it.” No warnings ap-peared on brake products until well into the 1970s, he adds, “and those warnings were inadequate.”

As a mesothelioma sufferers go, Rogers is doing well. The tumor appears to be contained. Still, he says, “The thought of having cancer and knowing there’s no cure for it works on your mind.”

Mesothelioma “sort of creeps and crawls,” creating a sense of gradual suffocation, says Dr. Alice Boylan, a critical care specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina. The average life expec-tancy for a victim after diagnosis is nine months to year, a sobering sta-tistic for someone conditioned to save lives. “It’s really wrenching,” Boylan says. “You can help people die to some degree, but not to save one person is pretty hard.” n

Dangers in the Dust | RUSSIA ©2010 Center for Public Integrity 49


MOSCOW — In the aptly named city of Asbest, in the Ural Mountains 900

miles (1500 km) northeast of Mos-cow, the dominance of Russia’s as-bestos industry — the world’s larg-est — is on clear display. Just east of the city is the massive open-pit Ural-asbest mine. At seven miles (11 km) long and 1½ miles (2.5 km) wide, it is nearly half the size of Manhattan — and more than a thousand feet (300 meters) deep. Nearly half a million metric tons of asbestos are gouged from the mine each year.

Seventy thousand people live in Asbest, once known as “the dying city” for its extraordinary rates of lung cancer and other asbestos-relat-ed diseases. But Uralasbest does not appear to have suffered any loss of status. It and other Russian asbestos producers operate with the swagger

that comes from unwavering govern-ment support. Controversy bypasses them, perhaps in no small measure because Prime Minister Vladimir Pu-tin is their ally. Nothing, it seems, is allowed to interfere with an indus-try that employs 400,000 people and, along with its counterpart in neigh-boring Kazakhstan, generates at least $800 million a year.

“We feel the absolute support of the state,” Denis Nikitin, a spokes-man for Russia’s asbestos lobby group, the Chrysotile Association, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. “The only way to remove our cheap and avail-able product from the market is to ban it.”

Ban or restrict asbestos is, in fact, what 52 countries have already done. Once widely valued for its heat and fire resistance, asbestos can no

The World’s Asbestos Behemoth

vasT amounTs sHipped oveRseas, used aT Home

By Roman ShleynovInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists




longer be sold in the European Union. In the United States — where the mineral already has taken an estimated 200,000 lives and the indus-try has paid out $70 billion in damages and litigation costs — asbestos use is limited to a handful of products, such as automobile brakes and gaskets. Fueled by an aggressive industry campaign, however, asbes-tos use has grown markedly elsewhere in the world, led by such countries as China, India, and Russia. With its new life in emerg-ing markets, the cumulative death toll from asbestos may reach 10 mil-lion by 2030, according to Dr. James Leigh, director of the Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health at the Sydney School of Pub-lic Health in Australia.

In Russia alone, the annual death toll is estimated at 10,400, according to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization. But that hasn’t influenced production.

In 2008, Russian mines yielded more than 1 million tons of asbestos — nearly half the world supply and more than three times that of the next largest producer, China. Russia is also, by far, the world’s largest ex-porter of the toxic mineral, shipping two-thirds of its supply overseas — pouring into world markets more asbestos than the next four top exporting countries combined. Its leading customers: Thailand, China, and India, followed by Indonesia, Vietnam, and Iran.

The 19th Century beginnings of a massive open pit asbestos mine near what would become the Russian city of Asbest. The mine would grow to become nearly half the size of Manhattan. (Credit: History Museum, City of Asbest)



Unlike another major exporter, Canada, which uses relatively little asbestos at home but ships huge quantities abroad, the Russians re-main heavy users. Indeed, Russia is the world’s third largest consumer, behind only China and India, using asbestos widely in roofing, automo-bile brakes, and insulation. Nearly 60,000 miles (95,000 km) of the coun-try’s water pipes are lined with as-bestos cement. All told, some 3,000 asbestos-containing products have been deemed safe by the Chief Sani-tary Officer of Russia, Nikitin says.

In April 2009, Prime Minister Pu-tin met with a group of labor lead-ers, including Andrei Kholzakov, chairman of the Uralasbest union and the International Trade Unions Alliance for Chrysotile (named af-ter chrysotile, the form of asbes-tos widely used today). Kholzakov shared his growing concern about a growing global anti-asbestos move-ment and asked for Putin’s help. The prime minister was receptive. “He promised to support Russian pro-ducers of chrysotile, especially in situations where we find ourselves under political pressure at the in-ternational level,” Kholzakov said afterward in a press release. “If we behave irresponsibly our opponents will certainly use the situation,” Pu-

tin is quoted as saying. “It goes with-out saying.”

Little Opposition

In Russia, anti-asbestos sentiment is muted at best. The few oppo-sition groups are outmuscled by the Chrysotile Association, which boasts of backing from an alliance of workers — “For Chrysotile” — that claims 12 million members in more than a dozen countries, in-cluding Russia, China, India, Brazil, and Canada. The alliance, according to the Chrysotile Association’s web-site, “represents the interests of its members in government agencies at all levels and in international as-sociations, and informs the public and mass-media about scientific re-search on chrysotile asbestos.”

The Chrysotile Association is part of an international network of industry groups that promotes the “controlled” use of asbestos despite strong evidence of the fibrous min-eral’s toxicity. The network’s mes-sage, as voiced by Nikitin, is consis-tent: chrysotile, or white, asbestos, is less dangerous than other forms and may be even safer than some substitute materials.

Olga Speranskaya, a leader of the Russian environmental group Eco-



Accord, believes that controlled use is “a myth.” Says Speranskaya: “If it is safe, why do you need to control it?” In 2008, Eco-Accord and other non-governmental organizations released a survey of the chrysotile industry in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, concluding that all forms of asbes-tos are dangerous and condemning industry officials for keeping the compound from being listed under Annex III of the Rotterdam Conven-tion, a treaty that requires exporters of hazardous substances to use clear labeling and warn importers of any restrictions or bans. The survey also decried the lack of research into as-bestos-related diseases in Russia.

“I think it is useless to continue arguing,” Speranskaya wrote in an e-mail to ICIJ. “The important thing to do is to give people the opportunity to examine the situation themselves.”

A Murky Business

Ownership of the biggest asbestos producers in Russia — Orenburg Minerals — and in neighboring Ka-zakhstan — Kostanai Minerals — is difficult to determine. Orenburg Minerals is now Russia’s biggest producer (followed by Uralasbest), scraping more than a half-million tons of chrysotile a year from the

Kiembaevskoe deposit, near the Ka-zakhstan border. Mined since 1979, the deposit holds about 25 million tons of asbestos, enough for at least 50 years of production.

Kostanai Minerals produced 230,000 tons of chrysotile in 2007. It has tapped the world’s fifth-largest asbestos deposit, Djetygarinskoe, since 1965. The deposit, in northern Kazakhstan, holds 37 million tons of chrysotile.

Both producers were managed by a British firm, United Minerals Group Limited, starting in 2003, according to a Kostanai Minerals investors report. The firm’s name changed to Eurasia FM Consulting Ltd. in 2005, but it is unclear wheth-er Eurasia still manages the two op-erations. In 2004, United Minerals controlled 30 percent of the world chrysotile market.

A Cyprus-based company, Uni-Credit Securities International Ltd. — part of UniCredit, one of the world’s largest banking groups, with 10,000 branches in 50 countries — holds stakes in both Orenburg Minerals and Kostanai Minerals “on behalf of un-disclosed clients,” UniCredit spokes-man Andrea Morawski told ICIJ in an e-mail. Morawski emphasized, how-ever, “We don’t exert any control over [Orenburg Minerals or Kostanai Min-



erals] nor are we beneficiaries of the stakes held. As far as we are reason-ably aware, we have not been benefi-ciaries of any fee/profit deriving from asbestos activities.”

Online profiles of one former and one active executive of Eurasia, available on LinkedIn, say the com-pany is an “investment subsidiary” of Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank, which is at the center of a political scan-dal. The government of Kazakhstan took control of the bank in February 2009; the following month, a crimi-nal investigation was opened against its former owner, Mukhtar Ablyazov, who was accused of embezzlement. Ablyazov, who had been an official in the Kazakhstan government, fled to London. He told Vedomosti, a Russian business newspaper, that the criminal case was politically mo-tivated. Before the investigation be-gan, he said, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev demanded that half the ownership in the bank be transferred to his trustee. Naz-arbayev’s press secretary declined to comment on the situation.

Kostanai Minerals has received backing from state-controlled banks in both Russia and Kazakhstan. In March 2008, the Russian Sberbank gave the company a $3.6 million loan. In 2007, Kostanai Minerals re-

ceived a $2.9 million loan from the Development Bank of Kazakhstan.

Officials with Orenburg Miner-als and Kostanai Minerals did not respond to ICIJ interview requests. A spokesman for BTA Bank called Eurasia a “client” of the bank and declined further comment.

Registered in the English city of Leeds, Eurasia lists only one shareholder — PL Company Nomi-nees Ltd. Eurasia and PL Company share the same address in Leeds. The founder of PL Company, British businessman Peter Michael Levine, also headed and founded Imperial Energy Corporation, an oil and nat-ural gas exploration company with major interests in Siberia and Kosta-nai, Kazakhstan, which itself was sold for $2.1 billion in 2009.

Levine could not be reached for comment. A representative of PLLG Group, which includes PL Company, said in an e-mail to ICIJ that Levine has not been associated with the firm for a substantial period of time. PLLG Group, the representative wrote, is a “professional services organization [that] maintains an ap-propriate policy of confidentiality.”

Financial records of Kostanai Minerals show transactions with at least nine U.S.-based companies, registered in Delaware, Colorado,



New York, and Oregon. At least three are listed as chrysotile dealers. The biggest was Asters Investments LLC, a now-defunct firm based in Eugene, Ore., which bought more than 48,000 tons of asbestos from Kostanai Minerals in 2004. In 2006, Asters did more than $1 million in business with a Ukrainian asbestos dealer that had partnerships with both Orenburg Minerals and Kosta-nai Minerals, according to an April 2006 investors report.

The biggest British dealer for Kostanai Minerals, United Minerals Global Trading, was registered in London in 2002; that year it bought 152,000 tons of chrysotile, accord-ing to the Kostanai investors report. The company’s name was changed to Minerals Global Trading in 2004, when it acquired more than five percent of the asbestos produced by Kostanai Minerals. The asbestos was sent to India, China, Iran, Tur-key, and Vietnam.

Kostanai Minerals and Minerals Global Trading did millions of dol-lars in business in 2008 and 2009, according to Kostanai Minerals re-ports. ICIJ could not discern the owners, directors or shareholders of Minerals Global Trading. Dozens of firms are registered at the same address in London. A BBC report-

er was told nobody at the address could help identify or forward a message to the company.

Compared to Orenburg Minerals and Kostanai Minerals, ownership of Uralasbest is quite transparent. Top managers control 38 percent of the company, according to a March 2010 company report. The board includes the owners of Uralasbest and representatives of two groups with offices in South Africa, which banned asbestos in 2008. The C. J. Petrow Group, headquartered in Johannesburg, owned about 14 per-cent of Uralasbest until 2003 and supplied chrysotile to developing countries. The Marvol Group — es-tablished in Germany, with offices in Cape Town, Amman, and Moscow — controlled about seven percent of Uralasbest until 2006. The company was founded by Mark Voloshin in the mid-1980s. Voloshin is a former dentist who reportedly was involved in sales of Russian military equip-ment to South Africa in the 1990s.

Representatives of Uralasbest and Voloshin did not respond to inter-view requests. In a 2004 report to in-vestors, Kostanai Minerals said that United Minerals had a constructive relationship with Uralasbest, its main competitor. “The risks of competi-tion are minimal,” the report said. n

Dangers in the Dust | MEXICO ©2010 Center for Public Integrity 55


MEXICO CITY — The American Roll factory is not a welcoming

place.Situated among homes and

schools in Barrio de San Lucas, a working-class neighborhood in the Mexico City suburb of Iztapa-lapa, the fortress-like brick build-ing emits a pungent, scorched-rubber odor that makes the eyes water and the head throb. It’s im-possible to see inside. A maker of asbestos brake linings, American Roll SA de CV has been at odds with its neighbors since 2001. Anxious residents say that their complaints about pollution from the factory go unanswered and suspect that the company has co-opted environmental regulators. They worry that they will meet the same fate as Jaime Carbajal.

Born and raised in the neigh-

A Growing Death Toll asbesTos casualTies mounT amid Weak enfoRcemenT and

a poWeRful lobby

By Ana AvilaInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Published Online | Month 00, 2010

Children gather at a food cart across the street from the American Roll asbestos brake factory (right). Residents of the Mexico City suburb of Iztapalapa have complained repeatedly about emissions from the plant but say they’ve gotten little help from regulators. (Credit: Jose Corea)



borhood, Carbajal lived a mere 150 meters from the factory. On March 4, 2008, he arrived at the emergen-cy room in Hospital General de Iz-tapalapa with sharp back pain and breathing difficulties. The doctor speculated that Carbajal had been

exposed to as-bestos, even though he had never worked with the mate-rial, and noted the proximity of his house to the factory. A month later, a specialist at the National Institute of Re-spiratory Diseas-

es in Mexico City wrote that tomog-raphy had detected “dense spots” in Carbajal’s lungs suggestive of asbes-tos exposure. Again, the location of the patient’s house was highlighted.

On May 11, 2008, Carbajal died at 58 of mesothelioma, a rare cancer triggered in almost all cases by the inhalation of asbestos fibers. For Berenice Martínez, another resident of Barrio de San Lucas, his death was confirmation that American Roll poses a threat to the neighbor-hood — in particular, to its 300 or so children. Martínez and a few oth-

ers, including some teachers, had pressured authorities to close the factory for years, succeeding only once, in January 2004. It quickly re-opened and its opponents gave up, one by one. “After all our claims were rejected, and finding myself sitting there alone, I just quit,” Mar-tínez says. “They took advantage of our fatigue and they won.”

American Roll refused to admit a reporter when she asked to enter the plant in March. In an e-mailed statement weeks later, the company said its emissions are always far below Mexican federal limits and it bears no blame for residents’ ill-nesses. “If this were the case, we don’t think that any authority could let that situation continue,” Maria de la Luz Martínez Ávila, American Roll’s legal representative, said in the statement.

3,000 Deaths per Year

American Roll is one of nearly 2,000 Mexican companies that use asbes-tos in an array of products — includ-ing brakes, boilers, roofing, pipes and wires — sold throughout the hemisphere. Valued for its heat and fire resistance, asbestos was once widely used worldwide but is now banned or restricted by 52 coun-

“After all our claims were rejected, and finding myself sitting there alone, I just quit. They took advantage of our fatigue and they won.”



tries, including Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Its use is forbidden in the European Union and limited in the United States to a handful of prod-ucts, such as automobile brakes and gaskets. Fueled by an aggressive industry campaign, however, asbes-tos use has grown markedly in the developing world, led by such coun-tries as China, India, and Mexico. With its new life in emerging mar-

kets, the cumulative death toll from asbestos may reach 10 million by 2030, according to Dr. James Leigh, the retired director of the Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health at the Sydney School of Pub-lic Health in Australia.

Thousands of those deaths are expected in Mexico, which used 17,000 metric tons of asbestos in 2007 — ten times the amount used

Dr. Guadalupe Aguilar Madrid, a physician shown in her office at the Mexican Social Security Institute, predicts an epidemic of asbestos-related disease in Mexico because of uncontrolled use of the fibrous mineral. (Credit: Jose Corea)



in the United States that year. Mex-ico ramped up imports of asbestos in the 1970s, largely from Canada; today its manufacturers buy most of their supplies from Canada and Bra-zil. According to the country’s Econ-omy Secretariat, 1,881 companies use raw asbestos. These companies employ 8,000 people, the National Workers Confederation says.

Dr. Guadalupe Aguilar Madrid, a physician and researcher with the Mexican Social Security Institute, which oversees public health under the federal Secretariat of Health, says that the country’s weak worker pro-tection laws have allowed dangerous conditions to proliferate and the hu-man costs are going to rise sharply. “The epidemic can grow like it grew in the countries that started to work with asbestos after the Second World War,” says Aguilar. She predicts that the annual death toll from mesothe-lioma, asbestosis, and asbestos-relat-ed lung cancer could reach 3,000 to 5,000, up from the current 1,500, and stresses that the epidemic won’t stop until the country bans asbestos.

Mexico’s Asbestos Lobby

Aguilar’s nemesis is Luis Cejudo Alva, founder and president of the Instituto Mexicano de Fibro Indus-

trias (IMFI), an asbestos trade group that enjoys a warm relationship with the government. A tall, thin man in his 70s, he insists that the IMFI has collaborated with regulators to im-prove workplace conditions. “We are close to the government authori-ties,” he says. “It has been arduous and constant work. We held meet-ings with them, we have participat-ed in creating the regulations, and invited them to the factories.”

A passionate defender of asbes-tos in Latin America, Cejudo insists the mineral can be used safely. He points out that IMFI members have agreed to stop selling asbestos to factories without adequate safety measures and that this has led to some plant closures. Cejudo trav-els frequently, his bills paid by the Montreal-based Chrysotile Institute (named after chryostile, or white asbestos, the only form used today). “This doesn’t mean they pay all my expenses, or that they give me a sal-ary,” he explains. He seems to relish his role as an asbestos evangelist. In a speech at a 2006 scientific confer-ence sponsored by the Chrysotile Institute, he described how his or-ganization worked with its counter-parts to ring up victories: Peru had been expected to follow Chile’s lead and ban asbestos and would have



done so but for the “quick actions” of the Canadian-led lobby. Colombia was “under siege” by anti-asbestos forces but the combined efforts of four groups, including his own, had held them off. In Brazil, “Attacks are there, but with the help of the Bra-zilian Chrysotile Institute, [asbestos producers] keep on going forward

as the river flows.”

The Chilean ban still stings, Cejudo says. “I was there, but nothing could be done.” The “asbestos de-tractors” were simply too strong.

A g u i l a r dismisses Ce-judo’s charac-terization of

the IMFI as a benign, safety-oriented group. It has paid for employees of the Mexican Labor Secretariat to tour asbestos operations in Quebec, she says.“They return to Mexico with the impression that it is possible to work safely with the fiber.” It also lobbies regulators: “When we have meetings to create the regulations, they attend,” Aguilar says. Indeed, it

sometimes writes the rules, she says, displaying a rule on workplace as-bestos exposures that she and Ceju-do agree was influenced by the IMFI.

The IMFI, Aguilar says, bears much of the blame for the looming public health disaster in Mexico. “They have dared to say that asbes-tos can be eaten with bread and but-ter,” she says, “despite all the scien-tific work that has been done.”

Cejudo says angrily that Agui-lar is lying about his organization and the hazards of asbestos. “Why does this lady say that the dust that comes from the [asbestos] sheets kills people?” he asks. “It is only dust …. These sheets are an answer for people’s needs.”

Schools, Protests, and Pollution

For nearly 30 years, the brake fac-tory in Barrio de San Lucas was owned by ITAPSA, a firm that op-erates a number of asbestos plants around Mexico City. ITAPSA moved to another location in the late 1990s and used the building as a ware-house. The factory reopened under the American Roll name in 2001.

The plant has 22 employees, divided into two shifts. It gener-ally runs 15 hours a day, five days a week, though neighbors say its

Luis Cejudo Alva



schedule is adjusted on occasion. “When they sense tension in the neighborhood, they work at night or on Sunday,” says Claudia Fuentes, who lives about a mile away.

At the request of Mexico City Con-gresswoman Alicia Téllez, the fac-

tory was toured in April by José Luis Cortés, di-rector of sur-veillance for the city’s Environ-ment Secretariat. Cortés declared everything to be in order, though

he acknowledged that he was tak-ing the company’s word when it said it properly disposes of asbestos and other hazardous waste. Téllez is du-bious.

“I was in Barrio de San Lucas,” she says. “I saw the people. I talked to them, and there is a general feeling that something is wrong … If there is nothing wrong, why wasn’t I allowed to take a look at the factory?”

Barrio de San Lucas is home to seven elementary schools, two high schools, and five preschools. On Jan. 29, 2003, Berenice Martinez, mother of three children, led other parents in a protest outside American Roll, de-manding that the plant be shut down.

The parents met afterward with offi-cials from the Education Secretariat, who pressured them to end the ac-tion and avoid talking to a television reporter at the scene, Martinez says. “Their intimidation was veiled, but we feared it,” she says. A Secretariat spokesman did not respond to infor-mation requests from ICIJ.

The protest had been prompted by incidents like one that occurred also in January 2003 at the Año de Juárez elementary school. A stench perme-ated the school’s classrooms, caus-ing the children’s eyes and throats to burn. The Mexico City environment minister inspected the factory at the request of the undersecretary of ed-ucational services but found nothing out of the ordinary.

An employee at Año de Juárez, who asked not to be identified, says that teachers who were sympathetic to the protest were threatened with sanctions if they persisted with their complaints. “We were told we could lose our jobs,” the employee says.

Aguilar, the physician, says she sympathizes with the people of Bar-rio de San Lucas and the American Roll workers.

“Who is taking care of these communities?” she asks. “Who is going to take responsibility for the deaths?” n

“Who is taking care of these communities? Who is going to take responsibility for the deaths?”

Dangers in the Dust | CHInA ©2010 Center for Public Integrity 61


FOR CHInA, it seems, the worst is yet to come.

Asbestos wasn’t used extensively in the coun-try until Deng Xiaop-ing’s reforms in the late 1970s triggered a surge of development. Given the lag time between exposure to asbestos fibers and the onset of disease, health experts say, the country’s pro-digious appetite for the mineral will have lethal consequences into the middle of this century.

Jukka Takala, director of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, says that the annual death toll from mesothelioma, lung cancer, and other asbestos-related

diseases in China may reach 15,000 by 2035. It’s the price the nation will pay for being the world’s top asbes-tos consumer and for failing until recently to address health risks as-

A Ravenous Appetite For Asbestos

Top useR cHina faces epidemic of canceR

By Jim Morris and Te-Ping ChenInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists


An asbestos mine in Qinghai Province, China. The country is now by far the world’s largest consumer of the toxic mineral. (Credit: Flickr user kevincure)



sociated with asbestos mining and manufacture. In 2007, China used 626,000 metric tons of raw fiber — more than twice that of the next largest consumer, India. It is also the world’s second-largest producer, mining some 280,000 metric tons of the mineral in 2008.

“In the future, China will face a public health crisis triggered by the use of asbestos,” says Li Qiang, executive director of China Labor Watch, which monitors workplace violations. “The guidelines that Chi-na’s government has put forward to protect workers do in fact offer workers protection. But the chal-lenge is Chinese officials don’t have any way to effectively implement them. Factories flagrantly fail to re-spect Chinese law.”

To be sure, workers in China face a multitude of threats, from toxic chemicals to dangerous industrial machines. They die at a higher per capita rate than workers in any other country, according to the In-ternational Labor Organization. But asbestos, a known carcinogen, is particularly lethal, scientists say, and China’s broad embrace of the mineral appears likely to produce an epidemic of occupational disease.

Valued for its heat and fire resis-tance, asbestos was once widely used

worldwide, but it is now banned or restricted by at least 52 countries, in-cluding Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Use of the mineral is banned entirely in the European Union. In the United States — where it is blamed for taking some 200,000 lives

and the indus-try has paid out $70 billion in damages and litigation costs — asbestos use is limited to a handful of products, such as automobile brakes and gas-kets.

But in Chi-na, asbestos use is boom-ing. More than 400 factories turn out 300

million square metersof asbestos sheeting for roofs and walls each year; other factories make asbes-tos brake pads, gaskets, and cloth. The industry’s main lobby group, the China Non-Metallic Minerals Industry Association, insists that chrysotile, or white, asbestos, the most widely used form of the min-eral, can be handled safely and

“The guidelines that China’s government has put forward to protect workers do in fact offer workers protection. But the challenge is Chinese officials don’t have any way to effectively implement them.



links from its website to materials from Canada’s Chrysotile Institute and Russia’s Chrysotile Associa-tion. The Chinese group denounces what it calls “exaggerations” of the fiber’s deleterious effects and says that those who use phrases such as “time bomb” to warn of looming disease outbreaks are biased. The group failed to respond to multiple interview requests.

The first asbestos mine in China was opened by occupying Japanese forces in the 1940s. Today, virtually all of the asbestos mined in, and imported to, China is of the white, or chrysotile, variety. An estimated 1,000 enterprises employing more than a million people are involved in the production and processing of asbestos, and up to 90 million tons of chrysotile are thought to

The Chinese village of Shimiankuang (literally, Asbestos Mine), in the northwest province of Qinghai. (Credit: Flickr user watchsmart)



be lodged beneath the soil in 15 provinces, mostly in the western part of the country. The Aksai Ka-zakh Autonomous County of Gansu Province alone accounts for half of these reserves and boasts an aver-age annual output of 170,000 tons.

While China has tightened its exposure limit for asbestos over the years, unhealthful conditions in many factories are believed to persist. In 2008, for example, offi-cials in the city of Yuyao, in Zheji-ang province, gave unsatisfactory evaluations to most of the 100 or so small asbestos workshops they inspected. That same year, a local journalist visited one of the work-shops and found extremely dusty conditions and employees wearing disposable masks, which offer little protection against the tiny, airborne asbestos fibers. Of eight workers who had just had chest X-rays, five showed lung abnormalities.

China has taken steps to try to mitigate the looming health crisis. Brown and blue asbestos — be-lieved by some scientists to be more hazardous than white — have been banned, as has the use of all forms of asbestos in automobile brake lin-ings and other friction products. In Beijing, no asbestos-containing ma-terials may be used in construction,

but their use is widespread in new buildings across the rest of China. And in both Hong Kong and on the mainland, the government has com-mitted to pay medical and rehabili-tation costs for victims of pneumo-coniosis, a class of lung diseases that includes asbestosis.

But for many workers, it’s too late. In a glimpse of what may be the mainland’s future, researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong reported in March that the number of mesothelioma cases in the city was still climbing and might not peak until 2014. This doesn’t bode well for the rest of the coun-try considering that asbestos use in Hong Kong, according to the re-searchers, reached its zenith in the early 1960s and mesothelioma can take 40 or more years to develop.

Unlike some Western nations, China has been slow to embrace as-bestos substitutes such as cellulose fiber-reinforced cement. Still, con-cern over unbridled asbestos use may be building in the region. Last year, Hong Kong hosted a meeting of anti-asbestos activists from around the world. The meeting gave rise to a declaration calling for a ban on all forms of asbestos in Asia. Whether that message was heard in Beijing remains to be seen. n

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